A particularly aggressive, purposefully abrasive and awfully loud brand of music that has spent most of the last decade in the underground is finally getting its day in the sun — literally.

Comment

By
Scott McLennan
Posted Jul. 21, 2013 @ 12:01 am

A particularly aggressive, purposefully abrasive and awfully loud brand of music that has spent most of the last decade in the underground is finally getting its day in the sun — literally.

The Something Bloody Metal Fest will feature an outdoor stage at Dusk, the Providence music nightclub that has put Rhode Island on the heavy-metal map. Dusk has been running a weekly heavy-metal night on Wednesdays for more than a year and the fest will use the club’s indoor stage as well as a temporary outdoor set-up to present 30 bands next weekend.

The weekly series has cultivated homegrown talent such as Bog of the Infidel and Witch King as well as provided an Ocean State stop for traveling bands within this tight-knit and independent music scene.

Something Bloody Metal Fest celebrates all of that. Among the top-billed acts are Dawnbringer from Illinois, Dehumanized and Malignancy from New York, Satan’s Satyrs from Virginia, and Cauchemar from Canada. But the top spot on Sunday goes to Phlegm, a Providence death-metal troupe that disbanded 10 years ago and is reuniting for the fest. And local metal maven Bob Otis will be playing both days, first with Lolita Black, and then on Sunday with I, Destroyer.

“We were limited to 30 bands. There were quite a few bands we talked about, and just had to pick,” says Tom Sly, who plays in Thrillhouse and first approached Dusk about booking metal bands there in 2011. “We wanted to focus on the local scene and bring together the bands that helped us get going. And then get bands like Dehumanized, bands we really enjoy and who influenced us.”

Dusk owner Rick Sunderland has been impressed by the metal community he has welcomed into the club. In the three years that he has operated the venue, Sunderland has always wanted to stage an outdoor festival on the property, and the metal option seemed the one most likely to succeed, he says.

“It’s hard, aggressive music, but the audience is incredible. They are the most chill, awesome people who enjoy intense music,” says Sunderland, who books rock and dance music as well at Dusk. “There’s never been a problem.”

Singer Mallika Sundaramurthy will be performing at the fest Saturday with her band Abnormality, which has grown from a local attraction in Massachusetts into a touring juggernaut with a fan base spread across the country and into Europe. She traces the roots of her success back to a time when she and Sly and Providence’s Corey Gomes, who has produced two music videos for Abnormality, were putting on concerts in fans’ basements.

“It’s a community where people form lasting relationships. We’ve been helped and we want to help by putting on awesome shows,” she says. Abnormality has played the Dusk metal series and Sundaramurthy helped land some of the bands coming to the fest.

Traveling around the country, Sundaramurthy has seen that what metal bands can tap into in New England does not exist everywhere.

“We’ll go to places where there are only two death-metal bands in town and they only play together,” she says. “There’s a lot of talent in this scene.”

And it’s diverse talent. The newer strains of metal are both more brash and more technically complex than previous generations of loud. As Something Bloody’s lineup illustrates, metal runs a gamut from the punishing brutality of the death-metal style to the more cerebral and groove-oriented strains such as Gothic doom metal and lava-like stoner rock.

“Metal is the only genre I can think of that totally subsumes other styles. You can play jazz-metal or classical-metal or punk-metal. I think that’s what attracts musicians to metal. It challenges you,” Sly says.

And within the metal underground, it’s common to see the different sub-styles mixed together.

Progressive-metal band Dawnbringer, for example, most recently released the flowing, melodic concept album “Into the Lair of the Sun God,” which sounds exactly opposite to the guttural blurts and blasts of Phlegm.

“I think variety is taken for granted these days on a festival billing and for the most part fans seem to embrace that,” says Dawnbringer’s Chris Black. “Of course there will be the hardliners in any crowd, but in the Internet age and especially in New England I think the fans have a broad palate.”

Black has played in and produced a variety of metal bands, and at this stage doesn’t even wonder if a particular project “is metal enough.”

“It’s never a question I ask myself nowadays.” Black says. “Heavy metal is part of my intuition, and I have learned to trust both completely.”

Scott McLennan can be reached at smclennan1010@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @ScottMcLennan1.